In the past 6 months I’ve been involved in hiring a lot of ASP.NET developers. It was very interesting to learn just how different skill sets ASP.NET developers have. It also made it more and more clear that every developer we talked to would fit into one of three categories:

The developer categories

With the ASP.NET definition in place it is now easier to look at the different categories of ASP.NET developers we have interviewed.

The web developer

Not many ASP.NET developers fall into this category. It’s usually the ones that come from classic ASP or PHP and made the switch to ASP.NET later on. They know everything about browser compatibility, JavaScript, CSS and the request life cycle. Also, they are usually not that hardcore in C# because they have mostly worked with client technologies. They are also more agnostic to the server-side platform and can work on PHP and RoR projects just as efficiently.

The web developer is also the kind of guy who thinks about new web technologies such as microformats and OpenID. This guy lives and breathes web.

The developer who builds websites

This is by far the biggest category. We’ve interviewed many developers who have worked with ASP.NET since it was first released. They have worked with everything from the database, data- and business logic, web services and ASP.NET. Most of them don’t care much for browser capabilities or JavaScript but they are hardcore C# developers. They have built many ASP.NET sites, but they are far from experts on the framework and stuff like modules and handlers are not where they have spent most of their time to say the least.

Their knowledge of the .NET framework, BCL and C# is immense, but they don’t qualify as web developers. They don’t live and breathe web, but their skills are just as needed in an ASP.NET project.

Take a web developer and a developer who build websites and put them in a room at the Romance Inn and wait 9 months. Then you get:

The ASP.NET super hero

This breed of developers is very difficult to get your hands on. They are a special race of individuals who know all about the ASP.NET framework and client-side technologies and are just as proficient in the more hardcore C# disciplines as well. ASP.NET is a very broad and diverse area because it is the point where the BCL, C#, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, dependency injection, unit testing, mocking, AJAX etc. all come together in one project. To master all these disciplines takes an ASP.NET super hero.

The web developer and the developer who builds websites are both very important to a successful execution of a website project, but at least one ASP.NET super hero is essential in my opinion.